Friday, October 19, 2007

Vienna, October 19 – Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov’s recent suggestion that the Russian government should re-establish a ministry for nationality affairs not only indicates that there may be growing support for that but also begs the question as to what issues such an agency should be responsible for and what powers it should have. Indeed, Sergei Markedonov argues in an analysis posted online today, such questions have plagued all Russian efforts to create a nationalities ministry that performs real political tasks and is not limited to a propagandistic, even “folkloric” enterprise (http://www.polit.ru/author/2007/10/19/luzhkov.html). After the 1917 revolution, Lenin established the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs under Joseph Stalin, but that institution proved both too weak – Stalin paid relatively little attention to it much of the time – and too meddlesome – its operatives presumed to have the right to get involved in all issues where ethnicity was a factor. As a result, Stalin himself liquidated this institution in 1924, and his Soviet successors did not try to recreate it. (For a useful discussion of the tensions that undermined this institution, see Stephen Blank’s The Sorcerer As Apprentice: Stalin as Commissar of Nationalities, 1917-1924 (Greenwood, 1994).) But with the end of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to establish first a state committee on nationalities and then in 1994 a ministry wit responsibilities in this area. But neither he nor his colleagues were ever happy with these arrangements and subjected the latter to numerous reorganizations. Then in October 2001, his successor Vladimir Putin did away with the nationalities ministry entirely – although he did appoint a “minister without portfolio” to oversee policies in this area and to develop a concept paper on what Moscow’s nationality policy should be. But efforts to reach agreement on that document quickly failed, and Putin’s own commitment to the re-centralization of power first in Moscow and then in the Kremlin and his desire to promote Russian identity political and ethnic effectively blocked the re-establishment of such a ministry. Recently, however, Putin’s own policies appear to have opened the way for some experiments at the regional level. In one, involving the new Perm kray, a special ministry is being set up to deal with the now subordinate Komi-Permyak district (http://www.izvestiya.ru/perm/article3109125/index.html). And in nother, in the Komi Republic, the government has announced that it will launch a 25-person ministry for nationality affairs at the start of next year in place of the existing department for ethnic affairs with its eight employees within the ministry of culture (http://finougor.ru/?q=node=4835). Such efforts and growing concern about inter-ethnic affairs and migration has prompted more senior officials like Luzhkov to raise the issue, either in the hopes of winning political points in this political season or out of the belief, frequently expressed, that “a multi-national country can’t do without a nationalities ministry.” But Markedonov, one of Russia’s most thoughtful commentators on ethno-politics, argues that most of these proposals have not been thought through or would lead to the creation of an institution whose primary tasks would be to promote “friendship of the peoples” rather than resolve ethno-national problems. But that would be a mistake because, as he says, “peoples as a matter of principle cannot become friends, only people and citizens, operating on their own life experience and knowledge can do so.” And because that is the case, any new ministry in this area must not represent a revival of what was done in the past. Indeed, he continues, it should not be a ministry for nationality affairs at all. Instead, it should be a ministry for nationality policy, whose tasks would include “the coordination, diagnosis, and predicting inter-ethnic relations” in the country, “the development and realization of reforms in federal relations, the development of a state program on migration, and the evaluation of educational programs in the regions. Were such a ministry with these responsibilities to be created, Markedonov suggests, then he would fully support setting it up, because such a ministry would help to promote two things he argues Russia desperately needs “the de-ethnicization of politics and the formation of a single political nation.” The Moscow analyst does not however indicate how such an agency could avoid the twin problems of earlier structures – so much power as to be dangerous or so little as to be irrelevant – but Putin’s move into the parliament may mean that he will be only to happy to have a responsible ministry he can use to expand his own power from there.

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About Me

Paul Goble is a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious questions in Eurasia. Most recently, he was director of research and publications at the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy. Earlier, he served as vice dean for the social sciences and humanities at Audentes University in Tallinn and a senior research associate at the EuroCollege of the University of Tartu in Estonia. While there, he launched the “Window on Eurasia” series. Prior to joining the faculty there in 2004, he served in various capacities in the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Broadcasting Bureau as well as at the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He writes frequently on ethnic and religious issues and has edited five volumes on ethnicity and religion in the former Soviet space. Trained at Miami University in Ohio and the University of Chicago, he has been decorated by the governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for his work in promoting Baltic independence and the withdrawal of Russian forces from those formerly occupied lands. Mr. Goble can be contacted directly at paul.goble@gmail.com